Guidant, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boston Scientific, has been charged with criminal violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act related to safety problems with some of its implantable defibrillators.
According to the information filed in federal district court in St Paul, Minnesota, Guidant concealed information from the FDA regarding catastrophic failures in some of its lifesaving devices.
The charges were filed following a four-year investigation into Guidant’s handling of short-circuiting failures of three models of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), the Ventak Prizm 2 DR (Model 1861) and the Contak Renewal (Models H135 and H155). Guidant issued safety advisories regarding the failures in June 2005.
ICDs are lifesaving devices used to detect and treat abnormal heart rhythms that can result in sudden cardiac death, one of the leading causes of mortality in the US. The devices, once surgically implanted, constantly monitor the electrical activity in a patient’s heart for deadly electrical rhythms and deliver an electrical shock to the heart in an effort to return the heartbeat to normal. If they fail to operate properly when needed, a person can die within minutes.
The information alleges that beginning in 2002, Guidant became aware that one of its ICDs, the Ventak Prizm 2 DR, was prone to electrical arcing, rendering the device inoperative and unable to deliver life-saving therapy to the patient in whom it was implanted. Guidant changed the design of the Prizm 2 in November 2002 to correct the problem.
The information charges that in August 2003, Guidant falsely told the FDA that the design changes did not affect the device’s safety or effectiveness. In fact, the device changes were made to correct this flaw, according to the information.
In early 2004, Guidant allegedly discovered a similar short-circuiting problem with its Renewal 1 and Renewal 2 devices. Following the July 2004 death of a patient associated with a shorted Renewal in Spain, the information charges that Guidant knew that the physician operating instructions for responding to a short-circuit within the device were false and misleading.
In an effort to remedy this, Guidant sent a communication by overnight delivery to physicians which the company dubbed a ‘Product Update.’ The information alleges that this communication was actually a correction to the device which attempted to mitigate the safety risk posed by the short-circuiting. Guidant was required by law to alert FDA of this action within ten days. The information charges that Guidant failed to make that notification.